So, we noticed recently that our Java and Python bindings were doing an extra round-trip to our servers for every request. We’ve just done updates to each of them that removes this.

Per the HTTP spec, when a request uses HTTP BASIC authentication, as our API does, the client is supposed to first send a request without credentials. When it receives a 401 error, then it should retry with the credentials supplied and repeat that process for each and every request.

While that makes sense for interactive use from a browser, for use in a web services API, it makes much more sense to avoid the extra round-trip and send the credentials already in the first request, thus significantly speeding up request times.